NEW DELHI: The government on Friday announced that the Winter Session of Parliament will commence from December 15. The session will end on January 5.

Ministry of Parliamentary Affairs Ananth Kumar confirmed that the Winter Session of Parliament will have 14 sittings and December 25 and 26 will be Christmas holidays.

“I request political parties to cooperate and make the Winter Session successful and fruitful. We expect that we will have attendance on all 14 days, including the New Year’s day,” the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader said.

For the past few days, the Congress and the BJP were in loggerheads over the delay in convening the Winter Session with the opposition party claiming that the government was doing so to avoid a debate on “scams”, including the Rafale deal, during the Gujarat polls.

The Cabinet Committee on Parliamentary Affairs, chaired by Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh, met on Wednesday and decided that the session would end on January 5, sources said.

Congress president Sonia Gandhi had attacked Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his government, accusing them of sabotaging the Winter Session of Parliament on flimsy grounds by “locking the temple of democracy”.

Rejecting opposition criticism that the government wants to avoid parliament before the elections, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley had said the session will be held and it will be a regular session, not overlapping with the Gujarat Assembly election dates.